Disability

The Conservative Party chairman, Grant Shapps MP, has been criticised by the official statistics watchdog for making misleading statements on incapacity benefit claims. Shapps had said in March 2013 that: '878,300 people claiming incapacity benefit – more than a third of the total – have chosen to drop their benefit claim entirely rather than face a medical assessment'.

Disabled people risk losing a total of £28.3 billion in income support by 2018 as a result of benefit cuts introduced by the coalition government, according to a new analysis from the Demos think tank. As many as 3.7 million disabled people overall will be affected.

The government's public spending cuts are targeted at people in poverty and at disabled people, according to think-tank analysis. It accuses the government of having made no effort to understand the cumulative impact of the cuts on minority groups, especially those with the greatest needs.

A contrasting picture of the operation of the work capability assessment for disabled people has appeared in two new reports. The first, an officially commissioned review, says no fundamental change in the system is needed. The second documents the actual experiences of disabled people going through the test.

Harrington review

The third independent review report, by Professor Malcolm Harrington, concedes that the assessment continues to be portrayed in an extremely negative light, often fuelled by 'adverse media coverage', 'representative groups', and 'political points scoring'. But while there are reports of individual cases of people being poorly treated by the process, the government can be 'reasonably pleased' with what it has achieved. A further period of radical reform to the process is not needed, Harrington believes, although he says some areas for improvement remain.

Claimants have described their experiences of the work capability assessment in a report produced by the campaign group We Are Spartacus. The report provides real-life accounts of the way 70 claimants were 'wrongly assessed, humiliated, badly treated' and forced to go to a tribunal to secure the benefits to which they were legally entitled.

The work capability assessment was introduced in 2008 to determine entitlement to employment and support allowance. Claimants going through the assessment have to satisfy the DWP they have a limited capability for work.

The government's benefit cuts are hitting disabled people hardest of all, according to a new report drawn up by a coalition of over 90 disabled people's organisations and charities. The report highlights the precarious circumstances of many disabled people, drawing on a survey of over 4,500 respondents and a poll of more than 350 independent welfare rights advisors.

Up to half a million disabled people and their families – including children and disabled adults living on their own – will be worse off under the government's proposed new universal credit scheme, according to an inquiry led by Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson.

The inquiry report summarises the findings from three pieces of research looking at survey evidence from almost 3,500 disabled people and their families. The three reports examined the impact of universal credit on families with disabled children, people receiving the severe disability premium, and disabled working people.

The National Audit Office is reported to have found ‘weaknesses’ in the contract between the government and Atos, the French private firm paid to carry out fit-to-work medical assessments. It says the Department for Work and Pensions has failed to penalise Atos for ‘underperformance’, and has not set ‘sufficiently challenging’ targets.

The NAO’s comments were made in a letter to Tom Greatrex MP, who had raised concerns about whether the DWP was receiving value for money. From October 2010 the medical tests have applied to everyone moving from incapacity benefit to its successor employment and support allowance.

Amid concerns that disability hate crime is being fuelled by government rhetoric over benefit ‘scroungers’, a newspaper has discovered that only a very small proportion of disability hate crimes are actually reported to the police.

Official Home Office estimates put the number of disability hate crimes at 65,000 per year, and campaigners say the figure could be as high as 100,000. But, according to figures obtained by the Guardian as a result of freedom of information requests, in 2011 fewer than 2,000 such crimes were actually reported to police forces in England and Wales; of those, only 523 resulted in a conviction.

Tens of thousands of disabled adults and children will be much worse off when the new universal credit comes into force from 2013, says a new report. The scale of cuts facing disabled people has not been properly understood because the changes have so far been viewed in isolation.

The report, by three charities, looks at a number of different scenarios to illustrate the impact of the combined changes on disabled children, adults and their families.

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PSE:UK is a major collaboration between the University of Bristol, Heriot-Watt University, The Open University, Queen's University Belfast, University of Glasgow and the University of York working with the National Centre for Social Research and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. ESRC Grant RES-060-25-0052.